In the end, none of that helped me. Along with millions of other Croats, I was pinned to the wall of nationhood – not only by outside pressure from Serbia and the Federal Army but by national homogenization within Croatia itself. That is what the war is doing to us, reducing us to one dimension: the Nation. The trouble with this nationhood, however, is that whereas before, I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character – and, yes, my nationality too – now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody because I am not a person any more. I am one of 4.5 million Croats.
I can only regret that awareness of my nationhood came to me in the form of punishment of the nation I belong to, in the form of death, destruction, suffering and – worst – fear of dying. I feel as an orphan does, the war having robbed me of the only real possession I had acquired in my life, my individuality.
But I am not in a position to choose any longer. Nor, I think, is anyone else. Just as in the days of brotherhood-unity, there is now another ideology holding people together, the ideology of nationhood. It doesn’t matter if it is Croatian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak, Georgian or Azerbaijani nationhood. What has happened is that something people cherished as a part of their cultural identity – an alternative to the all-embracing communism, a means to survive – has become their political identity and turned into something like an ill-fitting shirt. You may feel the sleeves are too short, the collar too tight. You might not like the colour, and the cloth might itch. But there is no escape; there is nothing else to wear. One doesn’t have to succumb voluntarily to this ideology of the nation – one is sucked into it.
So right now, in the new state of Croatia, no one is allowed not to be a Croat. And even if this is not what one would really call freedom, perhaps it would be morally unjust to tear off the shirt of the suffering nation – with tens of thousands of people being shot, slaughtered and burned just because of their nationality. It wouldn’t be right because of Vukovar, the town that was erased from the face of the earth. Because of the attacks on Dubrovnik.
Before this war started, there was perhaps a chance for Croats to become persons and citizens first, then afterwards Croats. But the dramatic events of the last twelve months have taken away that possibility. Once the war is over – and I hope the end is near now – all the human victims will be in vain if the newly emergent independent countries do not restore to us a sense that we are before all else individuals as well as citizens.
9
THE SMELL OF INDEPENDENCE
I was sitting in a car and through a windshield, down the road, I could see a roadblock with a yellow sign DOUANE and a policeman looking at someone’s passport, then waving them on. On the right side of the road there was a white metal house, like a trailer – a police and customs station – and on a high mast beside it fluttered the new Slovenian flag. It looked like an improvised check-point in some remote province, except that it was supposed to be a main check-point between Slovenia and Croatia and I was crossing it for the first time. The border was brand new too; the Croats hadn’t even had time to post a guard on their side. I got out of the car. Standing on a piece of asphalt in Bregana, bathed in a weak winter sun, I slowly reached for my passport and handed it to a Slovenian policeman, a young man who approached me, smiling, as if proud of what he was doing. I looked at my passport in his hands. It was the old red Yugoslav passport, of course. All of a sudden I became aware of the absurdity of our situation: I knew that, while he inspected my Yugoslav passport, he must still carry the very same one. There we were, citizens of one country falling apart and two countries-to-be, in front of a border that is not yet a proper border, with passports that are not good any more.
Until then, the Slovenian state, the Croatian state, borders, divisions, were somehow unreal. Now, these people with guns in Slovene police uniforms stand between me and Slovenia, a part of the country that used to be mine, too. A few weeks ago I was free to go there. Now I cannot. What would happen if I started to run now? I thought, suddenly remembering the Berlin Wall. Would the smiling young policeman shoot me? Although I was sure that he wouldn’t, for the first time I experienced the border physically: it felt like a wall. In that moment, I knew that everything they say about walls coming down in Europe is lies. Walls are being erected throughout Europe, new, invisible walls that are much harder to demolish, and this border is one of them.
At least I could still go to Slovenia, could travel there, even with a passport. I can’t go to Serbia. I can’t even make a simple phone-call to Belgrade. Perhaps, if I really wished to go there, I could take one train from Zagreb to Budapest, then an overnight train to Belgrade – twenty-four hours of travelling through Hungary, instead four hours on the Intercity train that used to take me direct to Belgrade before the war. But this is not the worst. Going east, there are no more roads, railways, no border; there are only bombed towns, burned villages and piles of corpses no one has had time to bury. What should be the eastern border of Croatia is nothing more than an open wound.
The last time I visited Belgrade was in July, after the Yugoslav Federal Army had attacked Slovenia. As I listened to the news in a taxi from the airport, a speaker said something about an army ‘victory’ there. ‘See!’ the taxi driver said with a triumphant smile, as if this was his personal victory. He didn’t know where I came from. I didn’t say a thing, I didn’t dare. His comment might have been casual and innocent, his triumphant smile a small and unimportant gesture, but it paralysed me with fear. The essence of war was there, growing silently between us.
The mistrust was palpable in the thick dusty air of Belgrade last summer. People from different republics couldn’t talk to each other any more, they stopped trusting. I didn’t like it then, that uneasy feeling of a country shrinking, being eaten by hatred, a country virtually disappearing under my feet. But I didn’t realize that it was going to be amputated in such a painful way. Not only land, but friends were cut off from each other, too. Friendships could hardly survive this war. Could they survive questions like: what did you do in the war? Could we address each other as individuals, or has this possibility been taken from us for the next twenty years? After the war the roles will be reversed and the victims will judge not only the executioners, but their silent accomplices. I am afraid that, as we have been forced to take sides in this war, we – all of us, on both sides – will get caught in that cruel, self-perpetuating game forever, even against our will, and I have no way of knowing if my friends are aware of this yet. If I ask them that question, I make myself into an inspector of their consciences, their souls. If I don’t, I am a hypocrite. But even if they pass this stern test, there remains the divisive fact of war itself – the experience of it, the way it has changed our lives. The fact that my (and their) friend is wounded, another still fighting, I don’t know where. The fact that a mutual friend’s house near Dubrovnik has been burned down. The fact that for a long time I, like everyone around me, didn’t know what to do with a word like ‘future’; I didn’t recognize it, it served no purpose at all. In this war, people have lost words, friends, sons, a sense of life. Even as I write this I hear machine-gun fire nearby. It is 11 pm and I can hear people’s voices and cars passing by. No one stops at the sound of shooting. Neither do I. A chilly thought that these shots might mean someone’s death is pushed away with the excuse that this is a war. Could my friends in Serbia ever understand how war has become an everyday reality for us – the air-raid alarms, the nervous waiting for news, men in uniforms, dark, empty city streets, blackouts, and a permanent engorging sense of fear, that only grows with each passing day?